Mashable

NOTE FOR 2018 READERS: This is the second in a series of letters to mark a little-known chronological milestone. According to UN data, average life expectancy at birth in 10 countries now exceeds 82 years — meaning babies born in 2018 have started being more likely than not to see the 22nd century.

What will the world look like at the other end of these kids' lives, in that not-so-far-off year of 2101? We may already be seeing the answer in today's scientific discoveries, tech world visions, and science fiction. But in these time-capsule messages to the next century, we also recognize that our hopes and fears will shape what the future will become.

Dear 22nd Century,

Your predecessors would like to offer a number of apologies for the ways in which we’ve failed you — in reality and on screen.

That was the theme of my first missive, and it’s still true: When considering what you would like to hear from us, there are certain elephants in the room. We’ve already addressed the ones named Trump and climate change, so which pachyderm is next in line?

Well, if you’re anywhere near as self-obsessed as us — and why wouldn’t you be, it’s a human trait that has remained near-constant throughout history — you’re mainly curious about what we thought you would become. And if you’re also obsessed with visual storytelling the way we are, and presuming you’re able to access our movie archive, you’ll be wanting someone from the early 21st century to explain the films we’ve left behind that are about, well, you.

Let’s be honest. The picture we’ve painted of your century is so nasty, it’s borderline libelous. Some of the most horrific and heartbreaking visions we’ve ever committed to screen are set on your turf.

Bob Al-Greene/Mashable

For this letter I’ve focused on 25 movies, or every single English language movie that is explicitly set in the 22nd century, from the earliest in 1966 to its most recent in 2014. That’s not exactly a huge number, considering how much we love science fiction these days, and the fact that you’re a mere eight decades away.

Still, you certainly can’t accuse us of ignoring movies that focus their lens on you. They include some of our most treasured science fiction classics, our finest horror movie franchise, one of our most beloved Pixar animations, one of the best sci-fi comedies, and the most influential student movie ever. Oh, and the global box office all-time champ in our time, Avatar (2009), stars you. Quite an honor!

Or so you’d think. In fact, when you look at them back to back, these movies all have one thing in common. They all portray the humans of the 22nd century as dumb, destructive assholes. (Sorry!)

Wall-E meets the future of the human race that you set in motion.

Pixar

In WALL-E (2008) and Elysium (2013), we see a 22nd century elite — mindless and heartless, respectively — leaving Earth to empty ruin or teeming poverty. In both Alien (1979) and Avatar, you lot are either greedy soulless corporate bastards who unleash/destroy creatures you don’t understand, or you’re Sigourney Weaver. Almost no one is Sigourney Weaver. (Do you know Sigourney Weaver? You should probably look her up on your neuro-implant search engine.)

You may be technologically advanced, but you use that technology to feed callous and base desires. You abuse robots (A.I., 2001) or you abuse clones (Cloud Atlas, 2012); either way, you’re all about having sex with machines. In TheMatrix (1999) the machines get their revenge and sucker you into being their batteries while you live a dismal virtual life. How dismal? So dismal, you think you’re us.

And in one of the most recent 22nd century movie to date, Ender’s Game (2013), you rip kids from their parents and use them as pawns in a war against aliens. We’re basically calling you the Trump administration on hyper-steroids. (Remember Trump? If not, proceed directly to my first letter.)

If I were you, I’d probably sue us for defamation.

Ender's Game: Literally kids fighting your war for you. How could you?

Lionsgate

To explain why our 22nd century moviemaking is such a downer, it’s necessary to go back to the beginning of the genre-we-didn’t-know-was-a-genre. The less said about Daleks — Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, the better; this 1966 film may be the first to be explicitly set in your century, but it’s a terrible re-tread of a Doctor Who serial. Not even Peter Cushing’s turn as the Doctor can save it. The Earth is an apocalyptic ruin, the Daleks are turning everyone into mind-controlled black PVC-clad soldiers, and the shlock factor is off the charts.

Then along came a guy whom we know better for space fantasies set a long time ago — George Lucas. THX 1138 (1971) was Lucas’ first feature film; though it bombed at the box office, it’s widely acknowledged as a groundbreaking work of art, the first modern dystopian movie — and in several odd ways, a major influence on Star Wars. Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB is the name of Lucas’ multi-award winning student short film, which gave rise to the later work.

Made in 1967, while Lucas’ hero Stanley Kubrick was making 2001 A Space Odyssey, this graduate school version of THX is a dark avant garde fantasy. It’s almost as trippy as 2001, but with no budget and a cast and crew borrowed from a military school. We see a man with the numbers 1138 tattooed on his head running through underground corridors, pursued by backroom operators via flickering screen and computer readout and “mind control.” But it’s the soundscape that really sells it: the distorted radio chatter of men who sound like proto-Stormtroopers over menacing ambient organ. Lucas loved George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and this post-graduate film school effort was the closest any filmmaker had come to the spirit of Orwell’s nightmare surveillance state on screen — “sexcrime” included.

As much as there is a story, it is told in strangely sexual captions. THX 1138 is an “ErosBod” whose “genesis” was a “sexacte.” (THX the audio company is well known in my day, but almost no one knows it had this racy origin story; Lucas even pronounced it “thex” to rhyme with “sex”). THX’s mate is YYO 7II7, a “ClinicBod,” who is informed at the end of the flick that he has to choose a new partner and to register his gender preference. Many of the pursuing police are “PerfectoBods.” And then in one caption we get the date: May 14, 2187.

Take heart, people of 2187: Lucas wasn’t really trying to predict a dark future for that particular date. May 14 is his birthday; 21-87 was the name of a weird little short from 1964 that Lucas adored in film school; it’s also where he first heard the notion of “the Force.” The title refers to the idea that people actually enjoy being regimented and mechanized, and will “really smile” when given a number such as 21-87. The science fiction-loving Lucas thought that number sounded like as good a future year as any; later he would recycle it again as Princess Leia’s cell block number on the Death Star.

Lucas didn’t follow through in setting the 1971 feature film version of THX 1138 in any particular year, preferring a “20 minutes into the future” kind of aesthetic. Nevertheless, the earlier THX’s baton of a strangely sexualized, highly fascistic 22nd century was picked up in 1973 by another brilliant young filmmaker in glasses — and he decided to come visit you in person. I speak of Woody Allen.

I don’t know how you feel about Woody Allen, 22nd century, or if you even know who he is. We’re having a hard time coming to terms with his legacy ourselves at the moment. My best guess is that you’ll look at him the way we look at D.W. Griffith, director of the groundbreaking Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith was a virulent racist who helped rebirth the Ku Klux Klan. Allen is in a very different category of reprehensible. Nevertheless, both of their oeuvres retain their cinematic significance, even when we censure the men themselves.

Luckily there’s nothing problematic about Sleeper, one of Allen’s earliest and funniest films. Even though it’s set in another nightmare future police state — 2173, this time — it’s also a stylish slapstick comedy; a tribute to the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope more than to THX (to which it also owed a debt). Allen plays a jazz musician who has been cryogenically frozen for 200 years, then awoken by a group of rebels who want to use his anonymity to help overthrow America’s 22nd century dictator.

This also gives Allen an opportunity to explain an old film of President Nixon to the future, which has forgotten who Nixon was. “Every time he left the White House, they had to check the silverware,” says Allen, deadpan.

Like THX, Allen escapes. He disguises himself as a robot butler, a kind of C-3PO prototype, in the home of an artist and socialite played by Diane Keaton. And that’s where we get to see the Orgasmatron, Allen’s most famous movie invention. It’s a two-person booth that delivers immediate sexual satisfaction behind closed doors. Without it, almost everybody in the 22nd century is frigid or impotent, Keaton explains, except for the descendents of Italians.

Again, we’re really sorry about all of this.

A rather more believable strain of 22nd century movie — the spacebound kind — was introduced the following year. Dark Star (1974), a dark comedy set at some time in the “mid-22nd century,” was the feature film debut of director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. Though made for a shoestring budget of $60,000, it didn’t embarrass itself in the wake of 2001 (Dark Star was the first movie ever to feature a craft going into “hyperspace”). Like Kubrick’s film, it featured a crew of three on a broken ship where everything seems to be going wrong; in this case, a beach ball-like alien is on the loose.

The fact that the crew is composed of three white dudes and a female computer is, we would hope, the least realistic thing about this 22nd century flick. But O’Bannon was clearly on to something with this idea of exploring our remote future via a small group of folks in space, and he set about writing a more scary movie with a more diverse crew.

Breakfast, 22nd century style.

20th Century Fox

The result was Alien (1979), the first serious 22nd century movie, with a serious Star Wars-sized budget to match. Alien only happened to be made because it was the only science fiction script on the desks of executives at 20th Century Fox when Star Wars became a mega-hit, and was dubbed “the nasty Star Wars” by its producers — the Rolling Stones to Lucas’ Beatles-esque crowd-pleaser.

By keeping things small-scale, focusing entirely on seven working stiffs on the commercial ship Nostromo in the year 2122, O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott managed to create what still stands as one of the more believable renderings of your century. The fact that every member of the crew smokes cigarettes is the only thing that now looks strange to our eyes, probably even more so to yours — but it did help give the future a dirty, lived-in feel, much more realistic than the gleaming spires and cape-covered costumes we used to imagine.

Because of Alien, it’s easy to believe that in your time there will still be people working crappy jobs and bitching about their share of the loot. Even in space.

As much as it is a masterpiece of horror and suspense, Alien is still kind of a bummer when it comes to predicting the future. We don’t know what’s going on back on Earth, but we do discover by the end of the film that Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and the rest of her crew were lied to and considered expendable by the corporation that owns the Nostromo. They put an android on board (Ash, played with perfect malevolence by Ian Holm) without telling anyone, and ordered him to bring the alien eggs to Earth even if everyone dies.

As in James Cameron’s follow-up Aliens (1986), where no one will believe what Ripley has seen and a team of mercenaries are sent to cleanse the alien planet, the arrogance and hubris of 22nd century people is off the charts. The Alien “Mother” is, in the final analysis, at least the second-most sympathetic character.

Way harsh, 20th century.

Even Disney doesn’t really like you. In 1979, the Mouse House dipped its toes in the waters of 22nd century space epics with The Black Hole. It's about a mad scientist (played with an equally manic beard by Nazi-era Austrian emigree Maximilian Schell) in a broken old ship on the edge of a singularity, into which he plans to fly. In pursuit of this suicidal purpose, Schell’s scientist has lobotomized his crew and programmed a bunch of killer robots.

So much for the thought leaders of your era.

Aside from the Alien franchise, the 1980s and ‘90s were lean times for 22nd century movies. There was the confusing mess of Hellraiser IV (1996), the beginning and end of which was set aboard a space station in 2127 at the suggestion of author Clive Barker. There was a forgettable time travel flick called Total Reality (1997) in which some of your future space rebels travel back in time from 2107 to 1998 and save Earth from being destroyed. (Gotta say though, good choice of destination: 1998 was a pretty great year, considering everything that came after.)

There was the terrible first attempt to bring Judge Dredd (which is set in 2139) to the screen in 1995, but even the superior second attempt (Dredd, 2012) didn’t offer up a future many of us would want to live in. That’s all down to the superior dystopian source material, of course. Dredd the comic book character is a fascistic zero-tolerance cop, empowered to sentence and kill all perpetrators or “perps,” whom he denounces as “creeps.”

Potential perps include … pretty much everyone, really. Post nuclear apocalypse, most of America is an irradiated wasteland; you’re all squeezed into vast crumbling Mega Cities that literally drive you insane. You act out in increasingly insane ways, diagnosed with new psychological conditions such as “Block Mania.”

Justice, 22nd century style.

Lionsgate

No wonder most of you take illegal future drugs as an escape. It’s a wonder you can read this letter, creep. (Sorry!)

We didn’t see a fresh cinematic take on you until The Matrix. That’s when we learned that sentient machines had had enough of your nonsense and went to war with you; in response, in 2105, you cut off their access to solar power by covering the planet in a shroud of black cloud. (Which is also a rather drastic way to reverse global warming). It didn’t have the intended effect, however, and when the machines stuck you in battery pods and made you think you were living in an early 21st century simulation, it seemed only fair. The movie itself is set in 2199, when some of you started to break out of the simulation.

Spoiler alert: Look away now if you don’t want the name of another film from around the same time that ends with someone waking up in the 22nd century and discovering that what he thought was his life was actually a simulation. It’s Vanilla Sky (2001).

In the 2003 follow-up Matrix Reloaded, we saw you all having some fun for the first time, at a rave in the underground sanctuary of Zion. After all those alien invasions, police states, nuclear wars, mad scientists and evil machines, you deserved a nice party.

Having gone through all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that you worked out your aggression on your machines. A couple of movies appeared at the same time in which you were unreasonably mean to robots. (As have we been, if you’ve seen the horrifying Boston Dynamics videos that are probably infamous in your time for spurring the robot uprising. Sorry about that!)

In Bicentennial Man (1999), a self-aware positronic android played by Robin Williams spends all of the 22nd century trying to get a future United Nations (the “World Congress”) to grant him the rights of a sentient human being. No, you heartless bastards reply. Sure, he’s sentient, but he’s also basically immortal, so … people would get jealous, apparently?

There’s also a dark undercurrent of anti-droidism in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Here the 22nd century looks bright and high-tech and utopian on the surface — well, apart from the fact that rising sea levels have wiped out New York and other coastal cities. But here you also abuse your human-like “Mecha,” putting the young and old models alike in “flesh fairs” where they are destroyed for the entertainment of crowds. Jude Law plays a type of Mecha called Gigolo Joe, and the idea of a bunch of sex robots running around your century looking like Jude Law seems both believable and utterly terrifying.

Meanwhile, John Carpenter had returned to the 22nd century in Ghosts of Mars (2001). It was a fairly forgettable horror and a box office bomb, but at least it showed you doing something positive for the future of humanity. In 2176, you’ve terraformed most of Mars and installed a matriarchal government — which, given how much damage men had wrought in the other movies, seemed eminently sensible.

But the 22nd century men were at it again in WALL-E. Although Pixar’s tale of a lonely trash collector robot on an abandoned toxic Earth is set in the 29th century, we see flashbacks to 2105 — the year a megacorporation called Buy-N-Large fled the dying planet in giant starliners. In 2110, they decided to never come back, and started to transform the human race into one of the most horribly believable on-screen depictions of our future selves — giant babies in floating chairs, obese and endlessly entertained, caring only for soda and screens.

It’s unfortunate that this is probably our most enduring image of what you’ll look like. Because as with most of science fiction, the floating baby future says more about the time it was made in than it does about you. Still, we’re really sorry.

Nice planet. Shame about those 22nd century people messing it up.

20th Century Fox

Avatar gave us a more positive image of your experience in space — up to a point. In 2154 you’ve reached Alpha Centauri and found a lush forest moon called Pandora. A rare element is found there that could help with an energy shortage back on Earth. (Many contemporary viewers rolled their eyes when the element was dubbed “unobtainium,” but to me that sounds like just the sort of nerd reference chemists could make when naming an element in any century.)

Of course, it all gets messed up by your arrogance and greed again. This time it’s a quasi-governmental corporation called the Resources Development Administration that insists on strip-mining for unobtainium to a point that could destroy the Pandora biosphere. No wonder your Earth is having an energy crisis if that’s the way you behave! (Sorry.)

The calumny continued in a flurry of 22nd century movies in the early 2010s. Far from beautiful Pandora, each one foretold a dystopia more depressing than the last. In Time (2011) gave us a glimpse of the year 2169, where people are genetically engineered to die at age 25 unless they buy or steal time from others, via clocks embedded in their wrists.

Cloud Atlas (2012) bounced around time all the way to the 24th century and back, but its stopover in the 22nd was the most dispiriting. We saw a club full of “fabricants,” or slave clones; one clone who tries to lead a revolution doesn’t just fail, she discovers that clones are turned into food for other clones when they die. Yecch.

Then there was Elysium (2013), which took a very specific 1970s-era NASA dream of a wheel in space — technically an O’Neill Cylinder — and turned it into an elite-governed monstrosity that you should feel bad about wanting to visit. Its defense secretary, played with steely coolness by Jodie Foster, casually nukes refugees in small personal craft fleeing the overcrowded Earth. For this war crime, she receives a slap on the wrist from her president.

Again, if you’ve seen anything of our current debate about migration and refugees, you’ll know that this anti-22nd century propaganda is really just us working stuff out among ourselves. We’d feel awful if this prevented you from actually building an O’Neill Cylinder, our most scenic workable design yet for space colonies. You just might want to make sure that your society is egalitarian enough for all classes and races to get on board. We’ll get to this question in a later letter.

A pristine O'Neill cylinder before the 22nd century got their hands on it.

NASA

Another sad post-apocalyptic space adventure followed in Interstellar (2014) — a 21st century movie for the most part, but thanks to all the heartbreaking time dilation effects, Matthew McConaughey ends up back in our solar system in the year 2154. Finally there was Divergent (2014), a post-apocalyptic tale of a dystopia set in Chicago where teens are sorted into factions against their will. This isn’t exactly a new concept for us, and Divergent was slammed as a carbon copy of The Hunger Games.

Speaking of which, author Suzanne Collins has never actually stated which time period the events of her books take place in. It’s just an unspecified future America, now called Panem and divided into 13 districts that are each forced to send teen champions into battle in the lethal eponymous tournament. But as best we can tell from the minimal clues in the story, The Hunger Games likely takes place sometime in — you guessed it — the 22nd century.

Why all this hate for descendants we will never meet, but whom we fervently hope will exist? Where are the positive visions of the next century? Why do we seem to be so sure you will descend into some kind of kid-killing dystopia?

Again, I wouldn’t take this personally. We’re just anxious about our politics and confused about our identity and unsure of our future; things are changing so fast that we have the sense of being in a car that is careering out of control. This can’t last, we say to ourselves. The collapse has to come soon … but maybe not so soon that I have a chance of personally experiencing it. (The flip side in many of these movies is a profound yearning to live in a world of casual space travel, which we assume you are. That’s the reverse impulse: We want to see what that’s like because we’ll never personally experience it.)

Until now, when it is less than a lifetime away from our youngest children, your century has been a safe enough distance away that it has become a dumping ground for all our fears. If there are lessons to be learned and warnings to be made, our screenwriters say, let us do it at a remove of a century or so. Let us serve the needs of drama by imagining the most fucked-up future possible within a given structural concept. Let’s add ticking-bomb time clocks to 25-year-olds and see what happens.

And that’s fine. That’s storytelling, or at least the currently dominant species of storytelling. But what Hollywood may have forgotten is the big picture. Perhaps displaying an unrelentingly depressing future in film after film may take the fight out of us — our movies become unwitting propaganda for dystopia, making it more likely to happen by tiny turns over decades. As a filmgoing species we are made numb to the most terrifying of our options in advance.

But as much as the film world is in charge of our popular future visions, that’s certainly not how we all feel. In future letters, I will stop apologizing and start outlining the reasons why the 22nd century will be a far, far better place than we’ve seen on screen for the last 50 years.